Developer community can contribute to test development and evolution;
Open source 3D API implementations can freely use tests to increase quality

January 24th 2017 – The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, today announced that it has placed conformance tests for the OpenGL® and OpenGL ES open standard APIs for 3D graphics into open source. Khronos has created a new GitHub source repository that will hold test sources for OpenGL and OpenGL ES as well the test suite for Vulkan® that was open sourced when Vulkan launched. The unified repository will encourage streamlined and accelerated development of tests for Khronos 3D APIs. The Khronos 3D API test sources are made available under the Apache 2.0 license at the repository available here.

“Following the lead of Vulkan, the OpenGL ES working group is excited to open our conformance tests to the public, increasing transparency and encouraging direct involvement from the development community to help improve test quality,” says Tobias Hector, chair of the OpenGL ES working group and leading software design engineer at Imagination Technologies Ltd.

Khronos will continue to invest significantly in the evolution of conformance tests for its family of 3D APIs, and in parallel will use GitHub to drive community input and engagement. Implementers of Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenGL ES that wish to use the API name and trademark, and enjoy the benefits of the Khronos IP framework, may become Adopters. Adopters gain access to formal conformance test suite packages, are enabled to submit the results from running the conformance tests to the Khronos Adopters web site for working group review, and for their implementations to subsequently become officially conformant. Along these lines, the OpenGL ES working group has released a new conformance package based on the open source repository, and Adopters are encouraged to submit against this new version 3.2.2 of the tests.

“Developers can now directly fix conformance bugs in place and contribute tests to make sure all vendors follow the OpenGL spec as closely as possible,” said Piers Daniell, chair of the OpenGL working group and principal engineer at NVIDIA. “A joint repository with OpenGL ES and Vulkan is an added bonus, as all three APIs can benefits from contributions to common code.”

Industry Support

“DMP has been a Khronos contributor for many years and developed GPU products as an adopter of the OpenGL ES API,” said Eisaku Ohbuchi, managing director and general manager of development at DMP. “We very much welcome this announcement, which will support the further dissemination and market expansion of Khronos APIs.”

“By growing support for Khronos’ open development of conformance tests, the Android ecosystem will be able to converge on a common set of automated tests for 3D rendering across the industry,” says Pyry Haulos, Khronos Vulkan conformance test lead and senior software engineer at Google.

“The members of the Mesa project are excited by this development. With public access to the test suite and the ability to contribute new tests, all OpenGL and Vulkan implementations will benefit. The quality and consistency of both open source and proprietary drivers will be better than ever,” said Brian Paul, founding contributor to the Mesa open-source OpenGL implementation.

“Complete and accurate conformance tests are critical to interoperability and portability of applications and tools across platforms,” said Robert Simpson, director, technical standards, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We believe open development of conformance tests for OpenGL and Vulkan is allowing the community to be more involved and responsive in the standards development process, reducing the time needed to bring new technologies to market at a higher quality.”

“The widespread adoption of the Khronos API standards has helped VeriSilicon to scale our GPU solutions to thousands of system integrators who have created more than a billion Vivante GPU powered devices in automotive, aviation, IoT and consumer products across the globe,” said Weijin Dai, chief strategy officer at VeriSilicon, Inc. "Placing these conformance tests in the public domain will empower the diverse user base VeriSilicon serves, and will further strengthen these Khronos APIs with community contributions and add value to these vital standards."

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision and neural nets on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, COLLADA™, and glTF™. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

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Vulkan is a registered trademark and Khronos, DevU, SPIR, SPIR-V, SYCL, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, EGL, glTF, OpenKCAM, StreamInput, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, NNEF and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.